Monday, March 05, 2012

Online Job Demand Improves in February and Supply/Demand Ratio is Lowest Since Nov. 2008

"Online advertised vacancies rose 39,900 in February to 4,423,300, according to the Help Wanted OnLine Data Series. The February rise follows gains in December 2011 of 125,600 and 61,300 in January (see top chart). The Supply/Demand rate stands at 2.9 unemployed for every vacancy (see bottom chart); however, nationally there are still 8.4 million more unemployed than advertised vacancies.

“In a positive sign the Supply/Demand rate dipped below the 3.0 level for the first time since November 2008,” said Conference Board Vice-President June Shelp (see bottom chart). “This reflects both significant gains in labor demand as well as drops in unemployment levels since the end of the recession. Labor demand is up 227,000 over the past three months, continuing to narrow the gap between the unemployed and available jobs. With the monthly level of job demand around 4.4 million, labor demand is back in line with the pre-recession series high in 2007.”

MP: The levels for both total online job demand (4.4 million) and new ads (2.75 million) are above their pre-recession levels, and the Supply/Demand ratio dropped below 3.0 for the first time since November 2008, more than three years ago. Overall employment levels are still far below pre-recession levels, but this is another sign that the labor market is gradually recovering and healing from the devastating effects of the 2007-2009 recession.

it seems to me that there is likely an interesting relationship between this ratio and wages.

i would suspect that at high levels, wages would have downward pressure/be stagnant, but at a certain point there would be an inflection point at which upward wage pressure would become intense.

also:

what are they using as an unemployment series?

it looks from the release like they are using u3, but that seems a bit tricky as most of the drop in that measure of unemployment has come from people being dropped out of the labor force because they are "no longer looking for work" and it also ignores a large number of "loosely attached" workers and those that are "part time for economic reasons".

The predecessor to the On-Line Help Wanted Ads Index is the Help Wanted Index. It measured the ads in print. The two series are roughly equilivent, but not completely. Unfortunately, that was discontinued in 2008 so it would be hard to make a comparison.

An academic team enlisted by Ohio's business sector released a study Tuesday that finds oil and gas drilling will mean more than 65,000 jobs and an almost $4.9 billion investment in the state's economy by 2014...